MrsDoyle

TIL, that is so interesting! I should start selling my blackcurrant jam in the States, it’s delicious.

A couple of times I’ve travelled Air NZ route that goes London-Auckland via LAX. The plane has to stop to refuel I guess. All the passengers are forced to queue up to be fingerprinted and have their eyeballs scanned, while a security guard walks up and down screaming “STAY IN THE LINE!” Then they’re herded into a lounge barely big enough to hold everyone (first class passengers have their own little pen next to the toilets). Apologetic air crew distribute apples, crisps and bottles of water. For hours. Through a glass wall is a view of the rest of the airport: shops, cafes, bars, space to stroll. But hey, at least you get to not miss your flight, and the US is safe from Kiwi tourists.

I don’t know if they still do this, I avoid the route.

Uxorious: devoted to one’s wife.

One thing that helped my posture was raising my monitor - a hardback copy of Infinite Jest did the trick. But follow all the good advice here too - core strength, stretching, massage. It is really, really worth the effort.

https://japaneseemoticons.me/all-japanese-emoticons/

Yeah, I guess … two out of ten for effort though? I mean, everything was spelled correctly!

I regularly shop at a supermarket built on a site where people were burned as witches in the 17th century.

A ship’s captain was away at sea and died after his ship was wrecked in a storm. Back home, his housemaid was accused of having created the storm and was burned at the stake. And there I am buying lemons and ice cream and toothpaste. It blows my mind.

I’m from New Zealand originally. Small town in a small country. The time zone joke back then was, “If it’s 5pm in Sydney, it’s 1956 in Auckland.”

You dialled by putting a finger in each number hole one at a time, dragging each one to the stop. When I was a kid our town’s phone numbers had just four digits, didn’t take long to dial.

You could opt out of being in the phone book. I had to do this because a crazy woman who had had a teacher by the same name as me, in the same suburb as me, kept ringing me. First call she said, “Guess who this is?” Dunno. By the tenth call that first day she was yelling down the phone that I was a liar, asking me “Why are you being like this?!?” Because I was never your teacher! No caller id back then, so I had to keep right on answering. One time I picked up and shouted “FUCK OFF!” and yeah it was a work colleague, that was awkward.

That punch! The whole episode nearly gave me a heart attack.

I’ve just caught up with Slow Horses. The main character is played by Gary Oldman in top form. He’s a spy, so decrepit and filthy you can almost smell him. He runs an outpost of British intelligence from a filthy, decrepit office staffed by a bunch of fuck-ups. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in ages. Lots of character development, back stories, car chases, bloodshed, even a tiny splash of romance. It’s on its 4th series, so I’m very late to the game. Probably because I don’t have Apple+.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Horses

Same here, my body goes to the local ned school. They’ll return to he ashes if you want, but I don’t care. I cleared it with my sister before signing the forms because she does care about cremains etc. Apparently the university has a memorial garden where they spread the ashes.

Allofmp3, that was it! I downloaded the Muse albums too. :-)

The swamps of Dagobah.

There was this Russian website where you could download whole albums for like 50 cents. I absolutely loved it, because as well as current hits it also had the most obscure, crazy stuff, classical music, jazz, and world music. I think they’re all in prison now, the guys who ran it.

Aaaand then there’s slime moulds. Some of which can run a maze…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold

I was out walking with a friend the other day and he tripped and fell. His watch told him, “It seems you’ve fallen sharply.” He had to tap the screen to stop it calling the emergency services. The other friend walking with us said his wife’s watch tells her to stand up if she’s been sitting too long. “And she does it!” I’m officially a curmudgeon, grumbling about tech taking over.

I’m going with beekeeping as my “field” because it’s my main hobby now I’m retired. So. Many. Misconceptions. The Bee Movie was not a documentary, people! The mating process for honeybees is horrifying and you don’t want to know. Male bees have one job, and then they die. If they don’t do that job, they still die; their sisters kick them out at the end of summer. Plus, I was talking to someone the other day who didn’t realise we let the bees just roam around.

Sometimes it’s couched as “team player”. Some jobs I had it absolutely mattered who you were friends with.